AUSOUG Conference 2007 Day 2

I enjoyed today’s programme very much. John Garmany gave a very easy-to-understand intro to the world of Regular Expressions. Luie Matthee spoke about virtualised Oracle 10g instances on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, most of which went over my head but I’m learning.

Apparently my red Red Hat hat is in the mail, but I did get a Toad toad.It croaks when it is dropped or bashed on something. It amused my 2.5 and 0.5 year olds for hours, which is something I can’t say for all the $50+ toys they’ve gotten over the years.

Unfortunately I missed Chris’ talk on load testing web applications, I’ll have to ask my colleagues who attended about that one. I was particularly interested to hear Duncan Mills talk about how to move Oracle to SOA, and I wasn’t disappointed. The surprise is how easy it is to consume web services even with Forms 6i, and the new event triggers in Forms 11 sound very exciting (i.e. no more polling the database to simulate asynchronous processing) – there’ll probably be some new triggers like when-event-raised and when-custom-event which can be used similarly to when-timer-expired, but perhaps without so much network overhead.

The day ended with a rather friendly debate over development tools. Chris Muir started well with good-natured jabs at Forms (hasn’t that gone the way of Cobol? and why are there hardly any talks on Forms anymore?), Apex (voted “Best Toy of 2007”), and .Net (who cares about MS at an Oracle conference anyway?). Scott Wesley pointed out the large installed base of Forms, it’s a mature product, no-one needs to talk about it because there aren’t any problems with it anymore. Penny Cookson extolled the simple power that is available to the Apex developer. David Shields made a valiant attempt to influence a roomful of Oracle developers to give MS a chance, but I think the odds were stacked against him :) Some probing questions from the audience prompted discussion of the various tools’ virtues for newbie developers, for integration with SOA, and for maintaining legacy apps. In the end I think it was decided that the winner is the “best tool for the job at hand”, in other words, everyone won (except perhaps for .Net ;)

My thanks to the AUSOUG committee for their hard work and dedication to bring off another excellent conference, and good luck in Melbourne!